Press Release

Quobyte Strengthens Its Parallel File System with Native Erasure Coding

Berlin, Germany, August 18, 2016 --(PR.com)-- Quobyte today announced a major update for its software storage system, providing the world’s most advanced parallel file system with a substantial performance increase and extended data safety capabilities. The update extends these capabilities with scalable high-performance erasure coding for file data and the extensive data management features that large organizations require.

“Quobyte is not just another distributed file system; it is next-generation parallel file system technology. Without compromising on file system features, it implements fault-tolerance and data safety purely in software and offers a much more reliable and easy-to-manage HPC storage infrastructure. With its capabilities, it blurs the line between primary and secondary HPC storage and scale-out NAS,” says Felix Hupfeld, Quobyte’s CTO.

Quobyte’s software storage system combines a high-performance parallel file system core with native data redundancy and safety features such as replication for data and metadata. The 1.3 release marks another milestone in Quobyte’s value for a wide range of HPC and scale-out NAS workloads. It improves performance significantly in terms of IOPS and throughput, delivers a sub-millisecond latency for direct I/O, and fully parallelizes metadata operations. The release also extends Quobyte’s data management capabilities for organizations that have a large number of users and file systems through cross-interface ACLs, integrated multi-tenancy and hierarchical quota support.

Core of the 1.3 update is erasure coding. For sequential workloads, erasure coding combines high storage efficiency and resilience without compromising performance. Just like Quobyte’s end-to-end checksums and quorum-replicated metadata, erasure coding is a mechanism implemented purely in software and is therefore able to turn standard server hardware into a fault-tolerant storage system. Compared to hardware redundancy like RAID it is not only more economical, but also makes the system much more resilient and easy to manage.

Quobyte’s roots lie within the academic HPC community. Before creating Quobyte, the two founders, Björn Kolbeck and Felix Hupfeld, together with their team developed the open source parallel file system XtreemFS at the Zuse-Institute Berlin, one of Germany’s supercomputing centers. Taking the best parts of their previous work and harnessing the founders’ experience with large-scale storage systems at Google, the Quobyte team built a brand new POSIX-compatible file system with Quobyte, adding cutting-edge technologies to make it suitable for enterprise use. The resulting storage system runs any application and any workload on any kind of x86 server.

About QuobyteQuobyte is software that turns commodity servers into a reliable and highly automated data center file system. It combines latest distributed systems research with proven concepts for large-scale infrastructure. Quobyte can handle all workloads in a single consolidated deployment: from virtual machines over shared file storage to Big Data and high-performance computing. It comes with all the benefits of a data center file system: full fault tolerance, resilience, scalability and self-management – in short, it greatly simplifies operations.

Quobyte was founded in 2013 with VC funding and is based in Berlin, Germany. Despite its young age, the company draws from nearly a decade of research and experience with the open-source distributed file system XtreemFS and from working on Google’s infrastructure. Quobyte’s customers profit from the system’s capabilities in such diverse areas as container infrastructures, public OpenStack clouds, supercomputing, and large-scale web services.